


Yellow Diamonds in the Light (The Pagford Remix)

by lurknomoar



Series: Bits and Pieces and Older Writings [17]
Category: The Casual Vacancy - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Bullying, F/M, Homophobic Language, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Past Character Death, Racist Language, Recovery, Redemption
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-22
Updated: 2020-06-22
Packaged: 2021-03-04 07:14:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,996
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24859723
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lurknomoar/pseuds/lurknomoar
Summary: Sukhvinder Jawanda rises from the river. Alive. Changed. Now it is time to face the rest of her life.
Relationships: Sukhvinder Jawanda/Stuart "Fats" Walls
Series: Bits and Pieces and Older Writings [17]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1467382
Kudos: 5





	Yellow Diamonds in the Light (The Pagford Remix)

**Author's Note:**

> Back in 2012, I read Casual Vacancy. I felt lukewarm about the book, but I became obsessed with two character arcs, Sukhvinder Jawanda’s ascent and Fats Walls’ descent. I put together the notes for a story about Sukhvinder healing and growing and very tentatively befriending Fats Walls, and the two of them have rambling philosophical conversations on public transport. It was partly a high-concept fic about survival and redemption, partly wish-fulfillment about a girl who remains oblivious that her former bully is developing a massive and mortifying crush on her.  
> Eventually I realized that even if I had the time and energy to write this story the way I want to, as a full-length novel, nobody would read it. Then I realized that if I wanted to do this story justice, it would require at least four different sensitivity readers, and since it’s a fic most people wouldn’t read even if I paid them, that wasn’t going to happen. Finally, I realized that in order to do this story right, I would have to take it more seriously than JKR had, and frankly I’m not prepared to do that.  
> So here is the fic, in short story format: I did my best, and I apologize in advance for potential inaccuracies in the depiction of a) the Sikh experience in small-town UK and b) various forms of mental health issues, self harm and trauma.

It all starts with a Facebook message, a few days after Krystal Weedon’s funeral. Fats sends a private message to Sukhvinder, a long and suave apology full of big words, it takes her a long time to read it. By the time she’s finished, he’s sent 13 other messages, short, clumsy, misspelled, hurried, each denying the first apology, saying that it’s dishonest, it’s artificial bullshit, that he doesn’t genuinely care about her and is therefore doing it for his own benefit, that he has no right to apologize to her and doesn’t deserve her forgiveness, he doesn’t even deserve to write her, to vomit these words at her. That he is a joker, a liar, a fucking fake, and he couldn’t stop joking, lying and faking even if he wanted to. The last one says ‘you don’t owe me forgiveness, or anything. i get it now, nothing can make this better. still i owe you something, idk you can punch me in the face if you want to.’ She doesn’t answer. She doesn’t forgive, but thinks that maybe Fats was able to see the odd lonely dark place inside her head because he lived there himself.

Fats has been missing school, but the next day he is back. He avoids Sukhvinder, gives her a wide berth, breaks eye contact. After her part in the very public tragedy of the Weedons, she finds herself in a strange respectful isolation at school, which gets worse when, few weeks later, Gaia leaves, moves back to London. Sukhvinder’s grades improve a bit, she can focus better now that Fats is not a terrifying presence but a strange, shaky shadow – she is still mediocre, but has some small successes.

The week after Gaia leaves, Sukhvinder starts going to counseling in Yarvil. It helps a little. One day, she goes to the river, looks around to see if she’s alone, then throws her blades into water. After a little hesitation, she throws in the stuffed animal she used to hide them in, too. The blades are hopefully gone forever, but the rabbit is going to little Robbie Weedon. Over the next month, she gets through GCSEs on autopilot. Gets extra time for dyslexia, she doesn’t really care, but does better than she expected.

Over the summer break, the Jawanda family take a holiday by the sea. Sukhvinder listens to audiobooks a lot. (The fact that her mother bought them is a compromise, an acknowledgement that her daughter will never read fast, and a wish to share stories with her anyway. And so Sukhvinder finally S gets through Narnia and Lord of the Rings, she reads Frankenstein and Passage to India and Fledgling, loves all of them.) She’s still afraid to uncover herself, to go sunbathing or swimming, but it’s easier to talk to her family now, it’s easier to just be around them.

Back in the UK she feels restless, sleepless, feels like self-harming again. She thinks of Krystal and goes alone into Yarvil, to the public swimming pool. (Parminder is overprotective, but has less time to enforce that after she gets her job back.) Sukhvinder feels fantastic once she forces herself underwater. From then on she swims regularly, the exhaustion helping her sleep.

Her councillor changes his schedule when the school year starts, and as she goes to her Tuesday evening appointment, she runs into Fats on the same corridor, leaving. She nods, he nods, she passes him by, tries not to think about it. This happens every week, the uneasy meeting, the quiet nod, but in school they don’t acknowledge one another.

Then one day in, sitting in Maths class, stuck on a trigonometry problem she’s unable to even start, she hears Fats’ hissing from the desk behind hers. ‘Hey. Hey. Hey. Jawanda.’ At her name she gathers her courage, thinks of Krystal, hisses back ‘what?’ Fats whispers the formula she needs to use in the problem, and she manages to solve it alone. Afterwards, for the first time in a long while, she decides to have lunch in the school cafeteria. (She hates the attention she still gets, and she got used to going to the shops with Gaia). She spots Fats sitting hunched over his tray, alone. She doesn’t really understand how she could ever have been scared of him. He is a gangling, skinny, mousy-haired big-eared teenage boy, at the moment clearly miserable, and she picks up her tray and sits down beside him. He looks shocked, then hides it, then tries to hide that he tried to hide it. They eat in silence, (or she eats, he seems to have no appetite) until she brings up the only safe subject, trigonometry. He fishes the problem sheet out of his bag, and they go over some questions together. Their awkward study-lunches repeat and becomes routine, just like their meetings at the councilor every Tuesday.

Sukhvinder doesn’t need to cut anymore, except when she really, really does. Grotesquely enough, the one thing that helps is to remember that day, the pain in her leg, the body in her arms, the ambulance ride, the calm, steady hands patching her up. When she sees a pamphlet for blood donation, she is struck with a sudden sense memory and goes to the clinic immediately. The nurse who draws her blood is kind and professional, sees her scars and doesn’t react at all. When she gets home, a little woozy but determined, she screws up her courage to ask her mother what it takes to work in an ambulance.

(Meanwhile: Fats’ father is deemed fit to resume his duties, and starts working at the school again, but only after he discloses the particulars of his OCD status to his superiors. He finds the ordeal really taxing and upsetting, but goes through with it anyway. Samantha throws herself into council work, and fights spiritedly for the Bellchapel clinic. Terri Weedon is taken in by some of her relatives: she is not better, but she is alive still.)

One Tuesday Suhkvinder finds Fats waiting for her after counseling. He says it’s because he doesn’t want her to go home alone because it’s dangerous for a girl in the dark, but then checks himself and admits that he didn’t want to go alone. They wait for the bus together, they talk about everything, anything, trying to avoid the elephant in the room until Fats asks ‘why did you do it? Why did you jump in the river?’ She can’t answer. She didn’t think about it. You didn’t think about it, Fats seems confused and intrigued. She asks about Fats bullying her, why he did it (and when she asks, he can’t answer, he genuinely does not know.) She comes to the realization that Fats is a mocking nickname, and doubts that he ever liked it – after all he IS ridiculously, unattractively skinny, with stick-like arms and legs, narrow shoulders. She realizes that her own arms are thicker, her stocky-muscular swimmer’s body is probably stronger. He was the class clown, turning losers like her into the object of widespread ridicule, but doing so in the certainty that if he didn’t, the crowd would turn on _him_. This doesn’t make the bullying any more forgivable, not at all, but it does become a little more understandable.

These shared bus rides back to Pagford become a frequent occurrence, and they start talking about more and more things. Once he falls asleep on her shoulder. (He says he didn’t sleep at all, that he went through a full pack of cigarettes instead, she tells him to quit smoking because nicotine is a stimulant, he says that’s not the reason he couldn’t go to sleep, she knows. She natters on about the physiological effects of nicotine until he nods off.) They even talk about their parents. (Fats calls Colin “father”, says things have gotten better once Colin stopped pretending to _like_ him, without the smarmy bullshit Fats can see how strong he is, how much he knows. He knows how to deal with stuff. What stuff, asks Sukhvinder. Bad stuff, Fats tries to explain, darkness, doubt, fear, shame, and Sukhviner nods, understands.)

All the while Sukhvinder keeps in touch with Gaia, they write e-mails, chat. When Gaia asks her to come up to London for a weekend, she does. Before leaving, she talks to Stuart. (She always calls Fats Stuart to his face, using the unfamiliar name to differentiate him from the familiar bully he used to be. He in turn calls her by her last name, Jawanda, as he had inflicted all his malicious puns on the first name Sukhvinder – Suck-vinder, Drink-windex). So, she asks him if he has a message for Gaia. ‘Why would I?’ ‘Well, you fancied her.’ ‘I didn’t. Arf fancied her.’ ‘So how come you snogged her?’ Fats is trying to light a cigarette, not shaking quite, but conspicuously clumsy _. ‘Arf fancied her.’_ No further explanation needed, she gets it. She knows Fats never managed to reconnect with Arf. She goes to London to meet up with Gaia and her new boyfriend. They talk, Gaia gets her terribly drunk for the first time in her life, it’s terrible and great, the next day they go shopping, spend hours picking out thrift-store tops and plastic jewelry, and Gaia gets her some flowery girly plastic hair ties which she starts using to tie her braid. It’s good to have a glimpse of a life outside Pagford.

Once when they are waiting for the bus, she ends up mentioning her self-harm, maybe because the bus is late, maybe because she’s had a hard day, maybe because she is angry at something thoughtless he said. He wants to see, and she shows him the scars. He looks stricken, and to her that feels like some strange sort of revenge. He starts explaining that he thought he was doing the right thing, no, he thought doing the right thing sucked and he wanted to do the authentic thing, the real thing, which in the end meant doing whatever he wanted. Part of her enjoys hearing him struggle for words. If that philosophy had worked, he should not have cared about her scars, or even her death, but he does care, he is horrified. His philosophy sucks and he knows it. ‘So your point is, you thought it was ok to bully me because you could, because I was weak?’ Fats scoffs ‘weak, my arse!’ He doesn’t explain why he thinks her strong. Later Fats tells her he thought about suicide a lot, especially during the summer, but never had the courage to go through with it, he’s a coward who can’t handle the sight of blood or even her mother’s insulin syringes – she tells him ‘coward, my arse!’, and the borrowed swearword tastes strange in her mouth. 

Gingerly and with a bitterness bordering on nostalgia, they talk about his bullying strategies, the cruel nicknames he used to give her. She asks about Tits n’ Tash – she knows she has a mustache but what’s wrong with her, you know. Fats looks at her, embarrassed, and says that nothing’s wrong, he just needed another T for the acronym. (But he has trouble keeping eye contact.)

In school everyone knows about Sukhvinder’s weird friendship with Fats. People speculate, but nobody dares to say anything to her face. Both of them are seen as beyond strange, they have become urban legends, ghost stories, her an unsettling unexpected hero and him the punchline of a dead baby joke, the two of them forever tied together by the death of the Weedon children. Everybody stares at them and hardly anyone speaks. She can’t see herself from the outside, but she can guess what others see when they look at her. She knows that she had a child die in her arms, and came back from that almost death herself. She tries not to think of her recurring blood donation as paying a debt, she tries to not think of it as anything but what it is: blood that will escape her skin and still be of use.

Sukhvinder’s silent and uneventful attendance at Yarvil is interrupted by a school-wide scandal. Some of her classmates catch Siobhan Fairbrother kissing a girl. At first there’s just whispers, then quietly intensifying ostracism, until one day it turns into actual homophobic bullying, people yelling at her in the corridor as she tries to get home, her head down. Sukhvinder sees it happen, and she doesn’t really know what to do, but the Fairbrother twins are kind of her friends, so she walks up, says ‘leave her alone already.’ The bully turns on her, escalates, asks if she is a lezzer too, loud, in front of half the school, asks if she is a rugmuncher, how long has it been since she’s eaten pussy, and so on. Sukhvinder freezes, knows that she made it worse both for herself and Siobhan, she never should have opened her mouth, she never should have been born. No. She tries to imagine what Krystal would say and it comes to her, loud and clear, Krystal’s voice with Krystal’s exact intonation coming out of her own mouth: ‘How long has it been? I dunno, when was your cunt of a mother last in town?’ There’s laughter, not much, but enough to turn the tide. The bully scoffs and storms off, not defeated but at least discouraged. Unfortunately a teacher overhears the last sentence, and Sukhvinder gets detention. Her mother hears about it, and she is like her old cold self when she snaps ‘you did what?’ But when Sukhvinder stammers through the entire story with one small euphemism, Parminder starts shaking with laughter, laughs like she hasn’t laughed in months, has to wipe tears from her eyes, tries to tell her off but is smiling proudly. Siobhan never thanks Sukhvinder, it’s not the sort of thing you talk about, and after all, she offered Sukhvinder similar protection before. But the Fairbrothers invite her to hang out, once in a while: watching movies, eating pizza with Niamh and Siobhan and Siobhan’s girlfriend Maura, a goth girl who seems nice enough.

One rainy day on the bus ride home, Fats and Sukhvinder talk about their futures. She tells him she isn’t sure she’ll get good enough grades for university, but she’s thinking of getting trained as a paramedic through a study-while-you-work program. It’s a good job, medical, helps people. Fats always thought he’d go to uni, but he knows he can’t go now: his grades have plummeted and he can’t bring himself to care. He’s interested in studying psychiatry, but it doesn’t seem feasible, not after tanking his GCSEs. She tells him that he should try nevertheless, that he’s smart, and if he studies, he can actually do good. Fats disagrees, but still seems glad to hear her say it. As he talks, he absentmindedly winds her long braid around and around his hand.

A few weeks before Christmas, the Religious Studies teacher invites students from different religious backgrounds to give short talks, and Sukhvinder, the only Sikh in her year, feels like she cannot refuse. She asks for Parminder’s help, they write the ten-minute talk together, and it ends up surprisingly decent. Sukhvinder stands in front of the class, and tells them about Guru Nanak rising from the river after three days, and nobody dares laugh, nobody dares to say it’s impossible: after all, she did come out of the river, her own presence is the miracle unspoken. ‘There is no Hindu and no Muslim’ she quotes his words, but she looks around and sees that in a Yarvil classroom filled with white Anglican faces, that once prophetic statement becomes mundane literal truth, becomes meaningless. She is talking about a religion that means nothing to them and very little to her, she is extolling a miracle that is both her birthright, and something so alien she had to start her research on the wikipedia page. But the magic of her own survival still holds, so she goes off-script and chooses to prophesize, in small, Yarvil-appropriate words. There is no Sikh and no Christian, she says, no white and no brown, no rich and no poor, no Pagford and no Yarvil, no gay and no straight, no teachers and no students. It’s only us here, all different and all the same, and if we don’t help one another, nobody else will. She doesn’t know if she’s making sense, but everyone is still looking at her, attentive, and when she gives a little jerky bow to indicate that she’s finished talking, one by one, they begin to clap.

There is a New Years’ Party – the Fairbrother twins decide to do something big, and they invite half the school. Sukhvinder dresses up for it. She knows she is still short and stocky, and swimming twice a week made her arms and back strong, almost manly. It’s strange, but for the first time ever, she kind of likes how she looks. She still has the mustache, and she considers shaving it off with her father’s razor, but in the end she’s too embarrassed, afraid that now people got used to its presence, they would remark on its absence. There are stars criss-crossing her arms, but they’ve faded to faint dull cobwebs, and some days, she feels brave enough to wear short sleeves, with only bracelets covering her skin. She feels more self-conscious about the long scar down her leg, still raised and angry, even though it tells people less about her past, about her mess. She puts on her nicest jeans and a red top Gaia picked out for her, one that isn’t too low-cut but shows her shoulders off. She feels almost ready to go out there and be seen.

The party is fun, or at least not terrible. There is music, there is food, there is alcohol, everyone is reasonably friendly. Fats is there too, which helps. Sukhvinder gets tipsy, but Fats gets drunk, and ten minutes before midnight, he suddenly understands that neither Krystal nor Robbie is going to see the New Year. He has a grief-laden panic attack right there sitting on the kitchen floor of the Fairbrother house. Sukhvinder talks him through it, tells him she is scared too, and sorry, sorry for not saving Robbie, not being fast enough, good enough. Fats disagrees, reminds her that he did nothing, that he ran away while she helped. He tells her that even if she failed, she tried, and that matters, because she did a Good Thing. But he, he can’t do good things, he’s never done one in his life, he hurt people out of boredom, when they were little he gave Arf a peanut just to see what an allergic reaction looked like, he could have died, what sort of person does that, are you even a person if you do that. He tells her he is adopted, he tells her nobody knows who the father is, he tells that the girl who gave birth to him, she was protecting a rapist, or maybe worse, protecting her father. He tells her he was born from the worst thing possible and he _is_ the worst thing possible, he wants to be good but he doesn’t know how, he wants to learn but he can’t, not while he feels like this, this terrible, he wants to vanish, he wants to not be, he wants to go away, can’t she tell him what to do to make it better. She says – well, donate blood, it’s what I do. He looks up, gives her a small tearful smile, and the next moment he is kissing her with clutching desperation. She kisses back, and it is clumsy but very, very good, too much tongue, too much spit, his hand tight on her waist, her breast. Then he realizes what he is doing, apologizes and stumble-runs away, almost crashing into the door frame on his way out. It’s twenty minutes past midnight: a new year.

She isn’t surprised, not really. Of course he doesn’t like her. He was just very drunk. She is not surprised, but she is saddened - she is realizing that she liked Stuart, she liked him much more than she thought she did. She feels like a right idiot, and wants to cut again, wants it so bad she can’t think of anything else. But by the time she gets home in the morning, she remembers that she actually meant what she said about blood donation, and she sternly tells herself that she can’t afford to waste a drop of someone else’s life. She brushes her hair out much harder than necessary, and goes to sleep.

He avoids her at school the next day, he avoids her the day after that, doesn’t meet her eyes, doesn’t return her greetings. He avoids her until she confronts him over lunch break, and asks him what his problem is, why isn’t he hanging out with her. She talks him into skipping class with her, hide at the bike shed. He seems unsurprised that she is angry, but surprised that she wants to talk. She gathers that he thinks he did something horrible, she assures him he didn’t. He mumbles ‘last time I kissed someone…’ was Krystal Weedon the day she died. The reason she died. He cannot even say it. He is a mass of misaimed, confused guilt. She asks ‘But why did you kiss me? What was the point? What were you proving, or trying, or demonstrating…’ He shakes his head. ‘Nothing. I just wanted to. But I that doesn’t make it all right.’ She doesn’t understand. ‘Come on Jawanda, you helped me get those things out of my head, or at least got what I was bloody well talking about. You are the only person who would still sit next to me in school. You always call me on my bullshit. You have the softest hair and strongest hands and when I ran and hid, you jumped into a sodding river to try and rescue someone. You are not scared of blood. You do good things, you’ll do great things, and I can’t do that, I don’t know how to make any of it right.’ She says ‘Just stick around. We don’t have to date, or do anything if you’d rather not.’ He laughs, snorts, says ‘I rather would, that’s the problem.’ She is very glad that he likes her, but she knows he is not ok, that they are not ok. He is standing there, dejected, hands at his side. He repeats ‘I don’t know how to make it right.’

She remembers his promise on Facebook, a long time ago, and knows that taking him up on it is the only thing to do. She warns him she will hit him, gives him time to brace, and punches him hard in the mouth, so hard that her fingers go numb and his mouth fills with blood. Then she starts speaking, and she doesn’t know where the words come from, she doesn’t know where she gets the authority, but she makes him promise that he will live, that he will study and work and try to do good every day, even when doesn’t want to and hates the entire thing and wants to quit. She will do the same, and if he wants to, they can do it together for a while. She steps up to him, holds him until he melts into her. She asks ‘Can I kiss you a little?’ ‘Yeah.’ She kisses him, runs her tongue over the cut lip, feeling proud and scared and hopeful, and he groans into her mouth before she pulls away. Then they sit there by the bike shed, playing truant, and he’s smiling, blood running down his chin, and he doesn’t let go of her hand, and she won’t let go of his. They are going to be all right.


End file.
